In your face

Robbie / Ivan and I like to take a wander in our lunch hour around London Bridge, and he's never without his Hasselblad camera.

Sometimes we go down to the shore line of the Thames, walking on history beneath our feet, shards, tiles, the building bricks of old London. Everything looks different from this angle. Beneath the walkways of Shad Thames, Ivan stops to frame the tunnel of repeating wooden beams. We head back toward the lanes and archways by the railway station. There's generally plenty of character waiting around there to be to captured on film.

There's something about a Hasselblad that demands respect. See someone taking a photo on a smartphone and chances are you'll walk straight across them. See someone leaning over a big silver box that makes a satisfying 'click-clunk' and you'll stop, look, then walk around them.

This was taken on the day we went into the electric bike shop. Of course, it’s not just a bike shop, it’s a café as well. We noticed this couple sitting at the table. Click-clunk, job done.

Ivan / We rushed out into one of the many good days we had last summer. I was keen to take a picture or two on this old film camera that is completely manual and mechanic. It is so retro it’s not even cool.

Most of the time people don’t even realise that I am taking a photograph  because I am hunched right over it, looking into it top side. To take this photograph, I had to rest the camera on something, as it was quite dark inside the café and the image would have come out blurred. So I used the handlebars of one of the bikes. An employee passed by on his way to the basement. I mumbled that I was taking a photograph. He couldn’t care less.

The two people sitting at the table didn’t notice that I was photographing them. I pressed the shutter and then, just before we rushed out, I took another shot from a different angle—exposing the last of the twelve frames on the film—and I caught this picture.

Ivan Maslarov is the picture editor of RE and Robbie Pattemore is the magazine's creative director.
Image ©Ivan Maslarov 2018